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We started the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) with a small handful of members, determined to build a multi-national, multi-generational and large-scale socialist party in a country that seemed to have mostly rejected socialism. The task seemed daunting. We were few in numbers with virtually no resources during a time when socialism was treated as an absolute taboo within the United States. Today, 17 years later the PSL has branches, collectives and members throughout the country. We have an organized presence in over 100 cities and towns, and have expanded our presences substantially throughout the South in recent years. We are growing dynamically and appeal to you to provide support for our continued growth.

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We need your help to build the movement for socialism - Liberation

The World Socialist Web Site issued an open letter to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) responding to neo-Stalinist attacks by DSA leaders against Leon Trotsky and the current representatives of his revolutionary legacy, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties.

The WSWS revealed that this campaignwith memes and statements celebrating the murder of Trotsky and the assassin himself, Ramon Mercader, and resurrecting the anti-Trotskyist slanders that served as justification for mass murder of revolutionaries under Stalins Terrorwas carefully coordinated by major figures in the DSA leadership with extensive connections to the Democratic Party.

By attacking Trotskyism through its DSA agents, the Democratic Party, a ruthless defender of Wall Street and US imperialism, is reacting to the growing movement of the working class in the US. Part of a global resurgence of the class struggle, this movement is clashing with the reactionary trade union apparatus and the bourgeois political system as a whole. The ruling class recognizes that this movement finds conscious expression in the WSWS, which has a growing audience among militant workers and socialist-minded youth, including within the DSAs own ranks.

The development of a genuine socialist movement, not only in the United States but internationally, requires that the working class learn to recognize the nefarious political role played by organizations like the DSA, the politics of which reflect the interests of the affluent middle class. In each country, organizations that share this same class character and pseudo-left politics are acting to divide the working class along national, ethnic, racial and gender lines and subordinate it to capitalism and its state.

This struggle is especially significant in Brazil and Latin America, where in recent decades workers have gone through the experience of the bourgeois Pink Tide governments, which, despite their populist rhetoric, failed to resolve the deep social, economic and political contradictions that have historically affected the region.

The DSA is also the political force behind Jacobin magazine, founded and edited by its member Bhaskar Sunkara. Jacobin has consistently acted to sow illusions in the supposedly progressiveand even socialistcharacter of the corrupt Pink Tide governments. In recent years, Jacobin has sought to mount an incursion into Brazil and Latin America. It inaugurated in 2019 both a Brazilian edition, in Portuguese, and a Latin American one, in Spanish.

These international operations have a sinister character. The DSA is a faction of the Democratic Party, which has historically oppressed Latin America, launching dozens of invasions, coups and interventions in the region over the past century.

The DSAs own pedigree is bound up with these crimes. It traces its origins to the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (DSOC), founded by Michael Harrington in the early 1970s. Harrington was an acolyte of Max Shachtman, who drifted far to the right after renouncing the defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and breaking with the Trotskyist movement in 1940. Shachtman embraced Cold War anti-communism and became a political adviser to the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.

Among the leading Shachtmanite cadre was Tom Kahn, who in the 1980s would become director of the AFLCIOs Department of International Affairs (later the Solidarity Center) as it defended the operations of US imperialism, particularly in the bloody counter-insurgency wars in El Salvador and Guatemala and the CIA Contra war against Nicaragua.

The anti-communist AFL-CIO bureaucracys role in Central America was in continuity with its previous intervention in Brazil through its American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a front for the CIA. The AIFLD trained and funded right-wing union leaders, including in the telephone and telegraph union, who backed the 1964 military coup that overthrew President Joao Goulart and ushered in two decades of dictatorship.

Also coming out of this tendency was Carl Gershman, who became president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1984, a position he holds to this day. The NED was created to carry out overtly the kind of financing of pro-US parties and unions that the CIA previously funded covertly. It has played a key role in Washingtons regime change operations in the region, from Nicaragua in the 1980s to Venezuela, funding leaders of the 2002 coup against Hugo Chvez and backing US puppet Juan Guaid to this day.

The current turn of the DSAa servile defender of the corporatist AFL-CIO apparatusand Jacobin to Latin America must be understood within this historical context. While presenting a left face, they are part of US imperialisms response to the emergence of an unprecedented political crisis in the region.

The past five years, since the shipwreck of the brief commodities boom, have been marked by accelerated growth in poverty, unemployment and an intensification of already grotesque levels of social inequality. The Pink Tide parties, which have gone on to implement capitalist readjustment programs, have been widely discredited, together with bourgeois establishment as a whole.

The opposition of workers and youth to the existing capitalist setup emerged in mass protests and strikes in different countries of the region, particularly since 2019. Both the social catastrophe and the radicalization of the masses have been sharply exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is leaving a trail of death and destruction across Latin America.

Latin American workers can only achieve their social demands by definitively breaking the political grip of all the parties representing the interests of the national bourgeoisies, regardless of the left rhetoric with which they seek to cover themselves. Only by this means can they unify their struggles across national borders, directing their appeals to their class brothers in the region and also in the imperialist countries, and adopt a revolutionary socialist leadership and political program. Jacobins efforts are aimed precisely at heading off such a revolutionary development.

Since its founding in 2019, Jacobins Brazilian edition has sought to introduce itself in Brazil as an authoritative voice of socialism. With this aim, it brought together the Brazilian representatives of Pabloite revisionism and its Morenoite variantswhich falsely present themselves as Trotskyistswith Stalinism and academic identity politics.

The person chosen to head the magazines political project, in close coordination with DSAs Sunkara, was Sabrina Fernandes, who had already contributed to the American Jacobin. Besides being a prominent YouTuber in Brazil and an academic, Fernandes is a leading member of the Socialism and Freedom Partys (PSOL) tendency Subverta, which is affiliated to the Pabloite international and defines itself as an ecosocialist and libertarian collective.

Fernandes international connections are worth noting. She began her academic career in Canada, where she affiliated herself to the reactionary New Democratic Party (NDP). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, an institution linked to the German state and the pseudo-left Die Link (The Left), which is also funding Jacobin Brasil.

The mainstream Brazilian magazine poca (usually uninterested in left politics) published an extensive and flattering profile of Fernandes. Speaking to the magazine about her political foundations, she declared: It is common for the radical left to say Oh, because Lenin wrote this, because Trotsky did that and try to give these answers to the different problems we have today. I claim that legacy, but we cant be anachronistic.

This emblematic statement is fully aligned with Jacobin's reactionary purposes. The magazine wants to claim the legacy of Lenin and Trotsky only to repudiate and combat it in every essential aspect, particularly their struggle to establish an independent political party of the working class, hostile to the influences of the petty bourgeoisie, and the struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeois state. Jacobins aims emerged in its first Brazilian issue, titled Marx & Co. The cover of the magazine was a comic-style illustration with cut-outs of historical figures, putting in Marxs company notorious anti-Marxists: bourgeois nationalists like Salvador Allende, leaders of Brazils Stalinist Communist Party, and Stalin himself. Some of the authors have publicly expressed discomfort particularly with the publication of an article by Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) member Jones Manoel, an open defender of Stalin and his historical contributions.

This episode shed light on the operations that preceded Jacobins publication in Brazil. Answering the issues raised by professors Sean Purdy of the PSOL and Ruy Braga, a former member of the Morenoite PSTU, who wrote on Facebook that they should have warned before about Jones Manoels participation, Sabrina Fernandes stated: But there was a warning before when Bhaskar came I explained that the magazine has a wide range that extends to the PCB on certain topics. The article is not about Stalin, you havent even read it yet. Anti-communism criminalizes all of us, that is the lesson of our political situation.

The message is clear: First, the inclusion of a representative of Stalinism in the magazine was not accidental, but a deliberate guideline laid down with the DSA. And second, any attempt to educate the new generation becoming radicalized on the historical divide between Stalinism and Marxisma division that, in Trotsky's words, is a river of bloodwill be furiously attacked by Jacobin as anti-communism.

Jacobin has its focused efforts in recent months on a campaign to present former Workers Party (PT) President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva (commonly known as Lula) and the possibility of a new PT administration as the solution to Brazils profound social and political crisis.

For 14 years the PT ruled Brazil in the interests of the capitalist class and in alliance with the most reactionary forces within its political establishment, including the countrys current fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro. The immense discrediting of the PT among workers and the partys promotion of the military and right-wing forces paved the way for Bolsonaros rise to the presidency.

After being convicted on corruption charges involving Brazils major construction companies, Lula was barred from running in the last presidential election in 2018. In March of this year, however, the proceedings against Lula were ruled legally flawed and the convictions annulled by the Supreme Court, restoring his political rights in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election.

This news was intensely celebrated by Jacobin, and it has continued publishing a series of articles with titles such as Lula is back and he can save Brazil from Bolsonaro. Once Lula assumes the leadership of social movements and left forces, he will confront the social crisis, restore democracy in Brazil, and even take the lead globally in the fight for universal access to vaccinesso claims Jacobin Brasils editor Hugo Albuquerque. In his opinion, all of these wonders are possible without any break with capitalism, quite the opposite.

Albuquerque makes clear that his hopes are based on signs that Lula is being rehabilitated by the Brazilian financial oligarchy. He states that the rapid advance of the Brazilian crisis could very well augur a new outlook among the countrys oligarchy. [T]he ruling class may begin to revise the wisdom of its longstanding anything-but-the-Workers-Party stance.

No doubt, within the Democratic Party administration of President Joe Biden and the US State Department there are also those who believe the interests of US imperialism would be in safer hands under Lula than Bolsonaro. As a faction of the Democratic Party, the DSA provides a left face for these tactical considerations in Washington.

To cover this pro-capitalist policy with pseudo-revolutionary language, Jacobin enlisted the services of a specialist, the veteran of the Morenoite movement Valrio Arcary. Arcary had held positions in the PT leadership before his organization, Convergncia Socialista, was expelled from the party in the early 1990s and formed the PSTU. Today he leads PSOLs Morenoite tendency Resistance.

In his article For a United Front with an anti-capitalist program, he makes grotesque distortions of the politics of Lenin and Trotsky and shamelessly falsifies the history of the Russian Revolution. He attempts to justify PSOLs support for a Lula candidacy by equating it with the demand All power to the soviets raised by the Bolsheviks after the February Revolution of 1917. Who ran the soviets?, Arcary asks, and answers, The moderate Menshevik and SR leaderships. He consciously omits the very existence of the bourgeois Provisional Government which was supported by the treacherous leadership of the soviets, against which the slogan drawn up by Lenin was turned. The aim is to portray the Bolsheviks as their opposite: spineless left supporters of the bourgeoisie, seeking to pressure its leadership to the left! In other words, equating them with the PSOL.

The significance of Jacobins operations to disrupt the development of a genuine socialist movement in Brazil was recognized by Lula himself. Around two weeks ago, Lula tweeted pictures of himself holding up copies of Jacobin Brasil and asking his followers, Have you read it yet?!

But these efforts are doomed to fail. Each new step in the development of the crisis of world capitalism is throwing the working class in Brazil and internationally on the road to socialist revolution and at the same time exposing ever more deeply the visceral hostility of these petty-bourgeois impostors to genuine socialism.

The struggle of the International Committee of the Fourth International to clarify the anti-Marxist nature of these tendencies and the historical roots of their treachery and to promote a real internationalist socialist program is laying the groundwork for creating a new revolutionary leadership in the Brazilian working class that will lead it to political power.

WSWS Review

What is the pseudo-left?

This review examines the response of pseudo-left political tendencies internationally to the major world political events of the past decade.

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State Department socialists: The sinister operations of Jacobin and the DSA in Brazil - WSWS

Joseph Biden ran for president as an environmental candidate, pledging to address global warming. On day one as president, he blocked all new gas and oil leases on federal lands and water, stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, and took the United States back into the Paris Climate Agreement. Now he is proposing a 2022 budget with $36 billion ($14 billion more than last year) for clean energy, improved water infrastructure, and more research. He also proposes to spend $174 million to develop electric vehicle infrastructurethough the Republican Party wants only a small fraction of that.

Environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, and Sunrise, spent some $1.5 million in the 2020 elections mostly for Biden and other Democrats. Yet, in the last few months the Biden administration has given the go-ahead to various projects either on federal land or necessitating federal approval: the Willow project, a large oil drilling project on Alaskas North Slope, oil and leases in Wyoming, and the continued use of the Dakota Access pipeline. All of these projects were approved by Donald Trumps administration and fiercely opposed by environmental organizations. As Gregory Stewart, a leader of the Alaska chapter of the Sierra Club, said of the Alaska project, They are opening up a lane for the oil and gas industry to cause irreparable harm to Arctic communities public health and wildlife habitats.

Since the COVID pandemic, the environmental movementunlike the racial justice movements spectacular demonstrationshas not been very visible. While local environmental protests continue, there is no large, active national movement. Environmental activists have focused on support for the Green New Deal legislation sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey.

Were going to transition to a 100 percent carbon free-economy, that is more unionized, more just, more dignified and guarantees more health care and housing than we ever have before, Ocasio-Cortez says. Do we intend on sending a message to the Biden administration that we need to go bigger and bolder? The answer is absolutely yes. The Democratic Socialists of America says of the Green New Deal proposals, they are conversation startersnot complete and adequate blueprints. While the GND calls for a transition to a more sustainable economy and a more just society, it does not take on the oil and gas companies directly.

The more radical wing of the U.S. environmental movement challenges the culture of growth and argues that carbon emissions can only be reduced by virtually stopping oil drilling and coal mining and closing down and drastically retrenching the industries that drive them: steel, auto, and plastics, among others. To do that, one would have to nationalize the energy industries and bring them under the control of a genuinely democratic government. That is, one needs to fight for socialism as the solution to the climate crisis. As the group System Change not Climate changes states, The current ecological crisis results from the capitalist system, which values profits for a global ruling elite over people and the planet. It must therefore be confronted through an international mass movement of working people around the world.

2 June 2021

Source: New Politics.

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Biden, the Oil Companies, and the Environment - International Viewpoint

Much of the time that we think we are talking about issues, we are actually talking about words. One side will argue against one definition of aword, while the other side argues in favor of adifferent definition of aword. Each side can claim that the other is not addressing the issue, because the issue is defined differently on each side. In this way, political debate can carry on unimpeded by any barriers of mutually agreed upon terms, like separate superhighways rushing on at full speed in opposite directions. This characterizes alarge amount of political discourse in this country: Torrents of people talking about different things, all of whom assume that they are talking about the samethings.

There is much hand-wringing today over the idea that misinformation and conspiracy theories and omnipresent propaganda have created asituation in which Americans dont seem to have asingle set of mutually agreed upon facts. That is true. But it does not capture an even more elementary flaw in what we are doing. We allow entire issues to be created and to be talked about endlessly in the national political media without ever determining what those issues mean.

The absurd effect of this failure is twofold. First, it allows bad faith political actors to purposely exploit this rhetorical vulnerability in order to smear the other side by inflating the definition of bad things to include whatever the other side is doing. This is standard issue political scumbag behavior, and is to be expected. Worse, though, it creates aself-reinforcing cycle in which widespread use of some vague, ill-defined term convinces the public that this term is something important, driving media coverage and creating impenetrable towers of meaninglessness that come to dominate our partisan politicallandscape.

If you can push abullshit issue into everybody knows territory, you can get away with never having to define it at all. What does it mean? Stupid question. Everybody knows this is anissue.

What does cancel culture mean? Does it mean Being fired from your job for being racist or sexist? Does it mean Being criticized in public for saying racist or sexist things? Does it mean Things that used to be seen as okay for white people to say now are seen as not okay and Iam upset about that because Ilike to say those things? It is easy to see how at one end of the spectrum of definitions, cancel culture is an extremely narrow, niche problem without any major impact on the general publicand at the other extreme, it is apernicious force that might come for anyone. If Iwere making an honest attempt to offer the definition of this term as it is most often used, it would be: People suffering consequences for things they said, with an overwhelming emphasis on the most goofy or misguided examples that we can find. By this definition, cancel culture is just arebranding of the ordinary human foibles that accompany the slowly evolving standards of society. Engaging in any debate at all about cancel culture without ameticulous definition of terms is to fall into atrap before you have evenbegun.

What does woke mean? Does it mean Aware of racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination and committed to working to eradicate them? Does it mean Khmer Rouge-style fanatics coming to seize and indoctrinate your white babies into their vicious cult? Its genuine operational definition is probably something like Anything that makes white people feel guilty. It is aterm that means nothing, and it is aterm that can instantly serve as aslur to discredit anythingan empty bucket into which people can dump every uncomfortable thing in order to invalidate it. The fact that major media figures allow debates about wokeness to happen with astraight face, and without awritten definition, is ridiculous. It is aperfect political black hole, amagic wand that can tarnish whatever anyone dislikes and be said not to apply to anything that they like. It means everything, which means that it meansnothing.

This same dynamic applies to terms that may have once had alegitimate definition, but which become definition-less by the time they have been elevated into the popular mind, laden with propaganda. Do any of the politicians or commentators decrying critical race theory have aprecise working definition for this academic term? Of course not. It now means Anything that talks about white peoplesracism.

And what does socialism mean, exactly? Apolitical scientist (or, you know, an In These Times reader) could tell you the textbook definition, but that does not matter one bit in the context of the terms actual use in America. Here, socialism is used as shorthand to mean anything and everything from a more democratic and egalitarian alternative economic system to capitalism to Social Security and Medicaid to Kim Jong Un executing his own top officials with anti-aircraft guns. To stand up and argue Hey, many broadly popular government programs could be considered socialist is to miss the point that the other side is not and will never be arguing against anything that is broadly popular; they will always redraw the definition of socialism at will to suit their purpose of making itunpopular.

To attempt to have any kind of good faith debate on any of these topics is the political equivalent of trying to hold back an ocean wave with your hands. Its just going to go around you. We cant expect politicians to stop creating these sorts of terms. After all, undefined words that serve to make the other side look bad and can never be pinned down enough to make your side look like hypocrites are the pinnacle of real world political speech. What we can expect, though, is for the media not to get sucked into this stupid and meaningless game, to serve as amechanism that reinforces the idea that unreal things are real. None of these pseudo-issues should be written about in respectable publications or spoken about on the airwaves until they have been subjected to arelentless and scrupulous defining of what they do and do not mean. Idont care if the attempt to define woke in ameaningful way takes the entire length of acable news segment, leaving no time for the ensuing talking points. The fact that coming to arealistic, mutually agreed upon definition sounds so daunting and time consuming is asign that the underlying issue does not, necessarily,exist.

Meanwhile, things like poverty and inequality and death and disease and climate change and war can all be easily quantified, defined and debated in ameaningful way. When someone instead spends all their time talking about things that seem undefinable, it is probably because they find reality to be an uncomfortabletopic.

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Words That Mean Nothing - In These Times

Bryan Oberc, in Munster, Ind., tries out an AR-15 from Sig Sauer in the exhibition hall at the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting in Indianapolis in 2019. Michael Conroy/AP hide caption

Bryan Oberc, in Munster, Ind., tries out an AR-15 from Sig Sauer in the exhibition hall at the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting in Indianapolis in 2019.

For more than three decades, California has banned certain types of semiautomatic rifles including the AR-15 under an "assault weapons" ban. On Friday, a federal judge threw out the ban, ruling that it violates the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

"The Second Amendment is about America's freedom: the freedom to protect oneself, family, home, and homeland," Judge Roger Benitez wrote for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. "California's assault weapon ban disrespects that freedom."

California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the decision "a direct threat to public safety," and state Attorney General Rob Bonta has said the state would appeal.

Courts differ on whether assault weapons bans are constitutional. That's because the Supreme Court has never actually heard a case testing their constitutionality.

The main guidance for lower courts comes from District of Columbia v. Heller, a landmark 2008 decision permitting private citizens to keep handguns in the home. The Heller test is straightforward: Is the firearm commonly owned by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes?

"If the lower courts were following Heller directly ... that would be the end of the case," said David Kopel, a constitutional law professor at Denver University Sturm College of Law, and adjunct scholar at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

But some courts, including federal courts in California, use a multi-step test that requires "policy-balancing," Kopel told NPR. That's why Benitez's 94-page opinion so exhaustively examines the pros and cons of an assault weapons ban.

Among similar cases that have been heard across the country, Benitez's opinion is "by far the most thorough in its careful examination of the evidence," Kopel said.

"This case is not about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits of Second Amendment protection," Judge Benitez wrote. The firearms that the California legislature had deemed "assault weapons" are actually "ordinary, popular, modern rifles," he said.

The judge was trying to demonstrate how ordinary the AR-15 is because when a weapon is in common use, it's protected by the Second Amendment, said Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who is also an adjunct scholar at Cato.

"I think the case for protecting the AR-15 is greater than the case for protecting the handgun," Blackman said. "The Second Amendment has a couple touchstones: One is self-defense. The other one is protection from the government itself. This is the weapon."

Michael Morley, a professor of law at Florida State University College of Law and contributor to The Federalist Society, said that the court "engaged with the record evidence, statistics, and factual underpinning of expert witnesses' conclusions at a highly granular level of detail."

But, Morley told NPR, "the opinion contains some rhetorical flourishes and argumentative portions that I don't believe strike the right tone for a judicial issuance."

One such rhetorical flourish came at the start of Benitez's opinion. The judge compared the AR-15 to a "Swiss Army Knife," calling it "a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense weapon." Benitez, appointed to the bench in 2003 by President George W. Bush, repeatedly criticized the state's ban as a "failed experiment" that "has had no effect" on mass shootings in the 30 years it was enacted.

The opinion reads like it's written "by an AR-15 salesman rather than a constitutional analyst," said Larry Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. "The bias fairly drips from the opinion, and the analysis certainly does not follow from the Supreme Court's jurisprudence about the Second Amendment."

This isn't the first time Judge Benitez has weighed in on controversial gun laws. In 2019, he struck down a state law banning gun magazines that hold more than 10 bullets. "Individual liberty and freedom are not outmoded concepts," Benitez wrote at the time.

It's very likely that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will ultimately reverse Benitez's ruling, said Kopel, because "no pro-Second Amendment has ever survived in the Ninth Circuit."

After that, legal observers say, it's possible the Supreme Court will step in to settle the matter. But that's far from certain. In 2016, the high court declined to hear a challenge to assault weapons bans in Connecticut and New York. The year before, the court rejected a similar challenge over local ordinances in Cook County, Ill.

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'Ordinary, Popular' Guns Protected By Second Amendment, California Judge Rules - NPR